Freddie & Me

A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody

This autobiography is about how Mike Dawson loved the music of Freddie Mercury and moved from the United Kingdom to the United States as a child. As such, I expected Freddie & Me to address in some fashion these topics:

Why Queen’s music was so appealing to him

How the near-death revelation of Mercury’s homosexuality and his having AIDS affected him

The culture clash between England and the U.S.

I think those are basic questions most people would have when told a book was about those subjects. Unfortunately, none of them are addressed in any significant fashion. I wanted to known why Queen mattered so much to Dawson, so much so that he tracks what happens in his life by what he was listening to, but instead of insight, I got anecdotes. Some are funny — Dawson tries to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” at a talent contest when he’s 10, only to be ushered off the stage early — but many are overly familiar, especially to anyone who’s read any other comic autobiographies about male geek artists. I feel like one of the people he writes about, who don’t understand his love for the music, because he never explains it to me.

I was left with the questions no autobiographical cartoonist wants to hear: what’s so special about your life? why should I bother reading about it? The most significant section of the book, in my opinion, is a between-chapters reflection on what memory is, what determines how we remember things, and how we change memories into stories. That was new and unusual. The rest, not so much.

The artwork is well-done and easy-to-read, populated with appealing blobby caricatures. The book is a rambling wander, although an impressive achievement at over 300 pages.

This interview at the Comics Reporter reveals more about the author’s goals. (A complimentary copy for this review was provided by the publisher.)

Related Posts:

3 comments

Harvey’s original material was observational; his subject matter wasn’t so much his own life as where the lives of others intersected with it, and his great skill was in presenting it simply but in an interesting way, and letting us know via his technique why we should think it was interesting. (It also helped that he kept most of his pieces no longer than four pages. That’s not overtaxing the reader’s good will.) His longform pieces focused on his own life have been considerably less interesting.

I reviewed Freddie & Me a few months ago and had pretty much the same reaction as Joanna. The core idea was pretty much, “LOOK AT ME!” I never got the slightest idea from the book that Freddy Mercury and the music of Queen had any more real effect on Dawson’s life than, say, Elton John’s music had on me, aside from being contemporaneous with his youth and giving his relatively ordinary life a marketing hook.

And it was something of a relief to see Johanna asking those same questions.